Alberto Granado

Alberto Granado, who died on Saturday aged 88, was the travelling companion of
Che Guevara on their youthful journey across South America, subsequently
celebrated in prose and on film as The Motorcycle Diaries.

At the end of December 1951, Guevara and Granado – who was the older of the pair by six years – set out from Argentina on a long-planned trek to see more of their continent. The trip was carried out in the face of some parental opposition, not least that of the Guevara de la Sernas, who knew that their son Ernesto was both a severe asthmatic and also a medical student who had yet to complete his studies.

Granado, himself a doctor, agreed that he would ensure that his friend "Fuser" returned to take his degree. The nickname was a tribute to the 23-year old Guevara's furious abundance of energy; he did not gain the appellation "Che" – a tag commonly given Argentinians by other Latin Americans – until his days as a guerrilla.

Riding on Granado's powerful but unreliable Norton 500cc motorcycle, their route took them over the Andes and up the coast of Chile to Peru and Colombia before they parted company in Venezuela seven months later. The diaries that the two men kept record a variety of escapades such as might be had on any gap year.

They stole fruit, narrowly avoided a beating from a jealous husband, visited Machu Picchu, were bitten by piranhas, interrogated in Colombia, and shot a pet dog in the dark thinking it a puma. They also met the footballer Alfredo Di Stefano, and themselves worked as soccer coaches, removals men and, most formatively, as assistants at a leprosarium in the Amazon jungle.

Their encounters for the first time with the great mass of South America's downtrodden and exploited – migrant sheep shearers, copper miners, Indian peasantry – were a key influence on the future direction of both their lives. For Granado, it confirmed his intuition that there was a wider world to see and help than the middle classes of his home town, while in Guevara it ignited a burning zeal to tackle the cause of such misery, which he came to see as capitalism.

Alberto Granado Jimenez was born in Hernando, Argentina, on August 8 1922. His father worked as a clerk for the railways and was active in trades unions. When the Argentinian military came to power in 1930, he was advised to leave Cordoba, where he and his three sons had been living, and resettled in Villa Constitucion. Alberto remained in Cordoba to be raised by his grandparents.

In 1940 he went up to the city's university to read Chemistry and Biochemistry, and it was while there that he met the Guevaras, who had moved to Cordoba in the hope that the mountain air would ameliorate Ernesto's asthma. Granado was soon politically active, and in 1943 was one of the principal organisers of a strike by students in protest at the policies of the country's regime. His actions led to his being sentenced to a year in prison, which only further radicalised him.

In 1946, having graduated, he became medical assistant to the head of the university's Hygiene and Epidemiology department. He had already developed an interest in Hansen's bacillus, and so the following year took a post as director of pharmacology in a leprosarium.

When he and Guevara parted company in Caracas at the end of their journey, Granada decided to stay on in Venezuela. For several years he worked in a leprosarium in Maiquetia, and then in 1955 travelled to study in Italy. That year he also married Delia Maria Duque Duque. Subsequently he became head of the School of Bio-analysis at the University of Caracas.

Guevara, meanwhile, had embarked on his career as a revolutionary. In 1956 he took part in Fidel Castro's initially disastrous invasion of Cuba, remaining with him until the ultimate success in 1959 of their campaign to overthrow President Batista. Granado was dining with Guevara's mother in Buenos Aires when they heard the news on the radio of her son's triumph.

In 1960 Guevara invited his old friend to visit him in Cuba, where he had become de facto minister of finance, and the next year Granado, still fired by socialist enthusiasm, accepted an invitation to settle there with his family.

He was appointed professor of medical biochemistry at Havana University, and in 1962 co-founded the island's second faculty of medicine at the University of Santiago. Granado was thus in part responsible for one of the undeniable achievements of Castro's government, the training and provision for the population for the first time of large numbers of highly-competent doctors.

Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967 following the failure of his guerrilla operations there, but Granado remained in Cuba for the remainder of his life. In the mid-1970s his attention turned to the breeding of cattle adapted to tropical climes and he became director of the Department of Genetics at the National Health Centre for Stockbreeding and Farming until his retirement in 1994.

In 1978 Granado published Con el Che por Sudamerica, his version of the diary he had kept of his journey with Guevara, whose own account of it had already become a posthumous bestseller. Granado's volume was translated into English in 2003 as Travelling with Che Guevara, and that year he acted as adviser to Walter Salles's film The Motorcycle Diaries, which was based on both books.

Granado, then 80, was much moved by the experiences he had in following the route he had taken half a century before, not least by encountering elderly men whom he had first met as boys. He was pleased, too, that buildings constructed for the scenes shot at the San Pablo leprosarium were afterwards used by the patients themselves. His part in the film was played by Rodrigo de la Serna, a second cousin of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.